Christ the Victim and the Representation of Sexualised Pain: A Feminist/Queer Theological Reading of Mark of the Devil​

IntroductionIn this essay, written entirely from a theological perspective, I argue that the films Mark of the Devil (Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält, Michael Armstrong, 1970) and Mark of the Devil Part II (Hexen geschändet und zu Tode gequält, Adrian Hoven, 1973) are at the same time Christian and feminist, even militantly so, despite their being usually ascribed to the exploitation genre. I will also show that the theological analysis of the visual elements of these two films raises a complex set of questions, forcing this writer to acknowledge that the representation of sexualised pain is part and parcel of his own Christian tradition and has included for at least some centuries a subtle play with queer identities.

Nineteenth-century reproduction of the icon of the Madonna del Sangue venerated in the village of Re (Val Vigezzo), Italy

Mark of the Devil and Its Sequel as Christian/Feminist Art WorksThe film Mark of the Devil revolves around two major characters: Vanessa (Olivera Vučo), who works as a hostess in a tavern, and Christian (Udo Kier), who is learning the ropes of the witch hunter from his patron, Lord Cumberland (Herbert Lom). Vanessa is accused of witchcraft, and through her influence Christian undergoes a total change of mind, which will lead to his demise. Two major and very recognisable Christian images bracket the film. In the early portion of the story, more precisely during the supper which the two main characters consume alone in the castle, Vanessa notices a painting of Jesus and Mary, prompting Christian to translate the Latin sentence found at the bottom of it: In gremio matris sedet Sapientia Patris (“The Wisdom of the Father sits in the lap of the mother”). In a somewhat naive yet very communicative fashion, in this painting some blood drops travel down from Mary’s forehead to the baby Jesus, prefiguring his own destiny, the crucifixion, and preparing us viewers for the bloody fate which Christian is going to meet at the culmination of the narrative. In the film, the painting is ascribed to “the Spanish school”; in reality, it is one of several known versions of the icon of the Madonna del Sangue, which first appeared in 1494 in connection to the blood miracle that occurred in the village of Re, near Vigezzo, Italy. The very last scene of Mark of the Devil shows a life-size crucifix and then superimposes such an image onto that of the martyrdom of Christian, the protagonist, suggesting visually the link between Christian and Christ which is anyway there in the character’s forename. Thus Christian is shown as a true Christ, the One who fights for justice and compassion but is misunderstood and vilified by the crowd, turned into a lynch mob. And just as Christian becomes Christ, Vanessa is turned into Mary Magdalene crying at the feet of the cross.

There are other Christian images (statues and paintings) recurring in the film, one of which is particularly significant for my interpretation. Before he rapes the wife of the puppeteer (Ingeborg Schöner), Lord Cumberland raises his eyes to meet those of the crucified Jesus. Immediately afterwards, another victim of Cumberland is brought into the room after having been tortured and is held by her arms exactly in the same position as the body of Jesus on the cross. Thus, although the character of Christian is the one that is more clearly identifiable as Christ, this other brief moment easily creates a connection in the mind of the viewers between Jesus on the cross and the victims of the witch hunters.

Even without considering the scene of the failed rape, however, the image of Mary as the throne of God’s Wisdom, tainted by blood, and the image of the crucified Jesus with Mary Magdalene at his feet frame the film Mark of the Devil in such a way that the story of Christian becomes a veritable re-enactment of the Christian story. The play on words here is inevitable. It is indeed strongly suggested, even imposed. The Christian story in its tragic version is expressed in a nutshell at the beginning of John’s Gospel by the following verse: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” [1] While this verse, historically, has encouraged anti-Jewish sentiments, it can also be read as declaring dramatically that the Wisdom of God has descended among humanity, intending to plant her tent among them and desiring to teach to human beings how to be just and compassionate, yet she has been utterly rejected. In this view, not only God’s Wisdom (i.e. Jesus) became humanity’s victim on the cross, but She became the symbol of all the victims that human societies have produced and continue incessantly to produce. [2] In this sense, the many women and the few men persecuted, tortured and killed as witches in early modern Europe must be seen as Christ-like figures, that is, as victims of a society which called itself Christian but continued to torture and kill innocent people, just as the Roman Empire did with Jesus. The fact that, in our object of study, ecclesiastical and civil authorities behaving very cruelly are portrayed as Christian does not mean at all that the film itself expresses anti-Christian or anti-religious sentiments. On the contrary, at least since the eleventh century, with the Patarines movement, Western Christians have decried the behaviour of the clergy in the name of the true teachings of Jesus Christ. [3] It is safe to say that Western Christianity has elaborated since then a version of the Christian truth maintaining that although the clergy is corrupt, the Christian ideals stand pure and undaunted by their vile behaviour, and it is my contention that Mark of the Devil takes such a position. Although its script does depend, at times, on certain generalisations about witch-hunting put forward by prominent Enlightenment figures in whose opinion Christianity as such was to be equated with obscurantism, [4] Mark of the Devil must be seen in the main as a defence of the Christian ideal or at least as a representation of its tragic impossibility in a world ruled by envy, driven by hunger for power and stained by people’s lust for blood. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene in which Lord Cumberland pretends to pray in order to send away an annoying guard. While this could be seen, if taken in isolation, as a critique of religion, in the context of the narrative structure of the movie the portrayal of Cumberland’s religiosity as a fake is a confirmation of the film’s negative representation of deception and religious pretence, not of religion as such. Percy Hoven, the son of the producer Adrian Hoven, confirmed to me that one of the major reasons behind his father’s choice to create both Mark of the Devil and its sequel was his disgust at religious hypocrisy. In Percy Hoven’s words: “My father had three sources of hope that sustained him: his faith in God, his faith in democracy and his faith in human reason … although he came back from the Russian front pretty dispirited, and I believe that part of the horrors that he experienced can be seen in Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part II, he never lost faith in those three sources.” [5]

​One particularly striking Gospel-like element of Mark of the Devil is the dialogue between Christian and Vanessa during the supper scene. In Mark’s Gospel a scene is recorded in which a woman questions Jesus about his own justice in a setting which evokes a supper. [6] Mark recounts how Jesus exited his comfort zone and by means of a dialogue with an unnamed woman learned to transform his own vision about religion and morality. Jesus is presented as a Jewish prophet and healer who, for reasons that we are not told, ventures into the region north of Galilee, which is mostly inhabited by non-Jews, but wants to remain incognito and does not intend to perform any healing in this region. The other character of the story, a non-Jewish woman, challenges this man of God to come to the fore and rise to the occasion. She questions why God would reserve his healing and life-giving energy only for the Jews. The Gospel text is as follows:

​From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. [7]

By means of the Syrophoenician woman’s shrewd yet very direct and proud intervention, Jesus’ stiff answer falls to pieces, he changes his behaviour, and the devil is cast out. The readers of Mark’s Gospel are led to believe that, through this event, Jesus’ narrow vision of God’s justice and compassion, and thereby his narrow understanding of his own mission in life, are enlarged and transformed. Just before this episode, Jesus started to criticise received religious traditions [8] and right after it his life-parable turns bitter, as he realises that, by criticising the powers that be, he is soon going to meet his own death. The episode of the meeting and the dialogue between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman can indeed be seen as a turning point in Jesus’ own identity formation, as he perceives that he has been called to preach and heal beyond the confines of the Jewish nation. In a quite similar way, the supper scene of Mark of the Devil is built upon the challenge that Vanessa brings to Christian, and more precisely to his self-understanding as a man of God. Both women essentially say to their counterparts: ‘Can you really behave like this, and still pretend to be right?’ Both men are quite confident of being on God’s side and both are inclined to compassion, yet this characteristic has not yet taken full possession of their personality. Both have been taught that human beings can be divided into two groups; for the character Jesus in Mark’s Gospel it is “the children of God” (that is, Jews) and “dogs” (that is, non-Jews), for the character Christian in Mark of the Devil it is good people and witches. In both cases, a woman belonging to the second, vilified group questions such an assumption and, as a consequence, the man changes his own understanding and his behaviour to the extent that he will soon undergo a violent death. In Mark of the Devil Christian says: “I have not opposed Albino, I have opposed injustice … I live to serve God, to free the world from all evil, that’s the highest aim a man can aspire to.” [9] Mark’s Gospel reports how Jesus understands his own mission in life in words that are similarly strong, including the idea of uprooting evil (the demons [10]) although moderated by the hope of transforming people. [11] In both cases, however, we can assume that the high level of idealisation entrenched in the self-perception of both men is brought to a crisis through the intervention of a daring and shrewd woman. In both cases, finally, the crisis is resolved by a widening of perspective and a tragic end. (A more detailed version of my comparison of these two scenes can be seen in the comparative table 1.)

Table 1: comparison between the supper scene in Mark of the Devil and the dialogue between the Syrophoenician woman and Jesus in Mark’s Gospel

By interpreting Christian as an alter Christus (i.e. a Christ-like figure) and Vanessa as the embodiment of the woman companion of Jesus who continually challenges him (a consistent literary figure in the Gospels, to some extent embodied by Mary Magdalene) we can reach an understanding of Mark of the Devil as a film that is both Christian and feminist. The strong and obvious parallels between the story of Christian and the story of Jesus, including the tragic end of each, are sufficient for seeing Michael Armstrong’s work as a Christian film, even without considering other elements such as those in my detailed reading of the supper scene or being aware of the filmmakers’ intentions. Moreover, the depiction of the women accused of witchcraft as innocent victims yet proud, strong and daring to the point that Vanessa becomes the leader of the revolt of the townspeople should give Mark of the Devil a feminist character very much in line with what had transpired in feminism in popular culture in the early 1970s.

​A detailed theological interpretation of Mark of the Devil Part II would run along the same lines, even though director Adrian Hoven introduced here at least two relevant differences. Firstly, among the people accused, tortured and executed we find one nun and one priest, who end up in the same cell praying and hoping sincerely for the afterlife on the night before their deaths. The element of martyrdom reinforces the Christian element of the plot, as again it clearly represents an internal critique of Christianity. Secondly, the scene of the crucifixion presents a female Christ (the nun: Astrid Kilian) and a female Mary Magdalene (the abbess: Ellen Umlauf) at the foot of the cross, thus reinforcing the critique of the victimisation of women while showing a positive image of lesbian love.

Contemporary Christian Theology and the Depiction of S/M ScenesThe theological interpretation of Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part II that I am offering here would be, however, quite insufficient if it did not address the audiovisual elements of physical violence and abuse which are prominent in both works. Up to this point my reading has been limited to the level of symbols and plot. I have performed an abstract analysis which could severely limit the validity of my conclusions. What about the way in which women are physically depicted in these two films? What about the showing of their naked bodies being tortured or (to a much lesser extent) enjoying sexual pleasure? The so-called exploitation element of Mark of the Devil and the sequel raises obvious questions and could be deployed for invalidating the reading that I have presented above. It is generally believed that exploitation movies adopt Christian imagery simply because it is recognisable by the viewers, without caring at all about its religious meaning and turning Christian symbols upside down in parody. While this might be true in general, I believe that I have already shown that it is not the case for the two movies that I am analysing. Nevertheless, another question remains: can a work of art be considered as feminist when, despite apparently taking the side of women in its storyline, it depicts them as objects for the (male) viewer’s consumption? And can a work of art can be considered Christian when it insists on making the connection between Christianity and images of torture and sexualised violence?

Images of the punishments of hell, external wall of the chapel of St. Stephen, Giaglione (Turin), Italy, anonymous painter, late fourteenth century

​One leading feminist theologian whose career was underway at the time of the production of these films has characterised human history as a continuous murderous attack on women or ‘gynocide’. Mary Daly writes: “Phallic lust is […] a fusion of obsession and aggression. As obsession it specializes in genital fixation and fetishism […] As aggression it rapes, dismembers, and kills women and all living things within its reach”. [12] The description of phallic lust offered by Daly obviously fits Lord Cumberland’s behaviour, a mix of obsession and aggression, nuanced by a hint of fear. “No one is safe”, he says to Christian. Indeed, no one is safe in a patriarchal situation dominated by phallic lust, where fear is pervasive. But the classic feminist question is: do we need to be reminded of this by a work of art? In the early 1970s, did movies such as Mark of the Devil inform the public about gynocide and denounce it, as this film purportedly does, or was their real purpose that of engendering phallic lust in men by offering to their gaze images of tortured women? A feminist documentary about witch-hunting filmed in the late 1980s carefully avoids images of torture and burning, although it is entitled The Burning Times, [13] and obviously it does so in order to avoid any complicity with what Daly dubbed ‘sado-society’, [14] that is, a society in which sadism is the norm. Radical feminists have no qualms in instantly dismissing all exploitation movies and have also noted that the Christian imagination of hell, whose cinematic qualities are well-known, can be seen as the direct antecedent of the violence depicted in such movies. It is indeed likely that in the late Middle Ages the vast majority of the people living in Europe were exposed to depictions of the punishments of hell, although not all such depictions have survived. One particularly striking example comes from a fresco painted in the late fourteenth century on the external wall of a chapel in the Susa Valley, now in the extreme Western portion of Northern Italy. The glorification of violence with a sexual spin, that is, the glorification of sadism, which is evident in images such as these, has since the 1970s induced certain radical feminists to dissociate themselves from Christianity, abandoning it altogether, while others have proposed a purified version of it, one that is not complicit with this kind of imagery whose effect seems only that of inviting more violence and more evil into the world.

​The fact, however, that painful, bloody and sexual imagery has been part not just of men’s religious imagination, but have also been peculiarly appropriated by women, raises a particularly delicate set of issues. Let’s take, as an example, the illustration of Saint Catherine of Siena flagellating herself before the crucifix, found in a fifteenth-century textbook of spirituality for women. She is depicted as radiant and satisfied, and there is no suggestion of sexual shame. While Jesus is dying or dead, she is pretty much alive; there is indeed a sort of relocation of life from him to her. The theology of the time insisted that the believer received pardon, and therefore life, from the death of Jesus, symbolised by the shedding of his blood. Here Catherine receives the spilt blood of Jesus on her head, in a sort of second baptism. In other images one can see the believer in the act of drinking the blood spilling from the dying Jesus. This is often the case in the well-known representations of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, although at times a male figure takes Mary Magdalene’s place. Famous examples can be seen in two panels depicting the crucifixion, both by Giotto. The same theme is explored in poems and spiritual treatises, as in this example from from fourteenth-century England: “When […] I see […] Your body […] all covered with blood, Your limbs wrenched asunder … then I readily feel a marvelous taste of your precious love […] I feel that blood in my imagination […] as it were bodily warm on my lips”. [15] This kind of spirituality that prevailed from the fourteenth century onwards (as earlier ascetic practices “were neither bloody […] nor represented as attack on […] the body” [16]) was by no means gender-exclusive, yet it bore specific meaning for women. It is possible, for example, to read the image of the self-flagellating Catherine as an actualisation in ‘contemporary’ terms of the historical theme of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, but also as an overcoming of it. Catherine not only receives God’s forgiveness by means of Jesus’ blood, but almost ‘becomes’ Jesus by mirroring in her own body the tortured limbs of her lover. She maintains a distinctly female bodily figure, yet she is also a living image of Christ. He is dying a shameful death, while she is living and free of shame. All of this can be easily dismissed as an internalisation of sadism and thus as a supreme example of masochism. Daly has indeed spoken of ‘sadoasceticism’ [17] as the specific form of the death-instinct that is found in Christianity. While her judgment rings largely true, it does not help the understanding in depth of images of this kind, their meaning for the people involved in their making and consumption and their connection to modern depictions of bodies being tortured and in pain.

During the 1980s and 1990s, feminist theorists (including theologians) engaged in a fight over the meaning of sadomasochistic sexual practices. Radical feminists were shocked at learning that groups of self-identified feminist lesbians practiced sadomasochistic sex. For radical feminists, the infliction of bodily pain during sexual activity, or even the verbal threat of it, were absolutely incompatible with feminist ideals, and the defence offered by the sadomasochistic groups, based on the idea of consent, was dismissed as naive and tainted by patriarchy. [18] At that time, one attempt at mediation was that of theologian Carter Heyward, who stated that “[w]e are electrified by alienated power dynamics, turned on by currents of domination and submission that are structured into the world we inhabit. As mirrors of the world, our bodyselves reflect the violence intrinsic to the dynamics of alienated power.” [19] In Heyward’s view, the recognition of such a state of affairs was the necessary first step for moving beyond the impasse in the dialogue between radical feminists and S/M women. She argued that the role-play typical of S/M sex among both women and men does not necessarily reinforce the dynamics of domination but can instead provide a safe space where such dynamics are probed and investigated, although she maintained that the aim of this sexual variation had to be that of moving beyond alienation. [20] It goes without saying that the issue of the representation of violence and sexualised torture in exploitation movies raises a different set of ethical questions than that of sexual practices among lesbians, but I maintain, with Heyward, that moral outrage in itself is not very productive, as it prevents any understanding of the human passions involved. And if we do not understand the passions driving behaviour, what kind of ethical perspective may we claim?

​Rather than imagining some sort of Eden (either feminist or Christian) where violence and pain are nowhere to be found, it might be helpful to try to understand in some depth the historical entrenchment of violence and pain within the scope of Christian spirituality, including the connections between Christian women’s spirituality and the (self-)infliction of pain. The dealings with bodily pain typical of Catherine of Siena and other saintly women of the late Middle Ages may or may not be construed as part and parcel of their own free agency. The participation of women in sexual S/M practices in the present context of late globalised capitalism poses a very similar problem. While I am not going to attempt here to resolve such a major issue, I am convinced that moralising does not help to decipher the behaviours involved. Without a doubt, the submission of women to the patriarchal order has been aided and abetted for centuries by the widely propagated idea of imitating the suffering of Christ, seen as the epitome of the submissive victim “who did not raise his voice”. [21] This must be denounced incessantly, especially because it is still happening today. [22] At the same time, we must question the rather simplistic solution of completely divorcing sex from pain, and sexualised pain from spirituality. My intention is not to move beyond Heyward’s aim, which remains my ethical point of reference, that is, mutuality is the goal of all human relations. This goal, however, can be reached only if, in the first place, we eschew idealisations, which, at best, make it impossible to identify the areas in need of transformation as we imagine our lives untouched and untouchable by violence and, more specifically, by sexualised pain. Today several theologians working in the areas of gender, sexuality and identity recognise plainly that the great majority of sexual acts imply some kind of play with power and submission, or with the threshold between pleasure and pain, or with an attempt to define what is pleasurable pain. The issues that are opened up, rather than solved, by such a new theological approach are innumerable. Jeremy Carrette, for example, acknowledges that “there are huge epistemological quandaries in understanding the erotic experience of S&M as religious or theological” while demonstrating, at the same time, the close similarities of such experience to the self-infliction of bodily pain in Christianity. [23] Marcella Althaus-Reid, in turn, has shown that the edifice itself of Christian theology is made of sexualised power-practices, which explains why mainstream theology feels the need to separate sex from power and from God, and why queer theologians feel the need to challenge such a hypocritical separation. [24]

The martyrdom of Saint Agatha, fresco in Castell’Arquato, Piacenza, Italy

These new theological perspectives which I have merely touched upon here support the idea that the theological judgment of the representation of sexualised pain and violence cannot be one of mere condemnation. In short, the ethical and theological evaluation of the representation of sexualised pain must be much more complex than it is often imagined to be by many theologians and feminists alike. When sadistic scenes re-inscribe the symbolical societal code of violence against women and sexual minorities, theological judgement must be strongly negative. However, scenes re-enforcing the patriarchal code of violence and submission are equally present in advertising and in mainstream films as in exploitation movies. It is important for those liberal theologians who are prone to condemn sadomasochistic scenes to ask themselves to what extent their position differs from that of the benevolent Christian censor who allows violent and/or sexual scenes to pass when he deems them to be essential, or at least relevant for ‘telling the story’, and cuts them when he finds them ‘gratuitous’. [25] The horror vacui experienced by the Christian censor is, in my view, perfectly understandable. At the same time, it should be recognised that not only the torture scenes typical of exploitation movies but also, for example, the fourteenth-century images of hell that I presented earlier in this article can be found guilty of being ‘gratuitous’, in the sense that the story of the Last Judgment can be told without recourse to such an indulgent abundance of details. The Gospels, in fact, tell the same story in terse though sharp terms. [26] But can the Christian theologian allow herself simply to dismiss that portion of the Christian tradition that does not conform to her ideals, or should her probing of images of sexualised pain go deeper?

​The historical derivation of the scenes of torture in movies such as Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part II from Christian images of sexualised pain, either inflicted or self-inflicted, complicate the matter more than most theologians are ready to admit. It is clear that for several hundred years in Western society images have been circulating which, apart from the story that they tell on the surface, are also recounting the subtle connections between pain and pleasure, or even between pain, pleasure and spiritual ecstasy. We might not want to hear what these images are trying to tell us, but this should not be a reason for their ethical or theological condemnation. Such images, in my view, not only predate the making of Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part II, but give to these two movies a specifically Christian visual context which they ‘exploit’ in the sense of being a continuation, and not a mockery or a reversal of it. Among such images, one can find both common themes and rarer ones. An example of a common theme is the martyrdom of Saint Agatha, very often shown at the moment when her breasts are torn apart. Variations of this image are found innumerable times in frescoes, illuminations and paintings. One such torture scene found in Castell’Arquato, Piacenza, Italy, represents the saint as smiling, probably in an attempt to show her ecstasy, although the artistic quality of the image makes it look more like the depiction of a merry sexual encounter. The much less common theme which we could label as ‘Christ in the dungeon’ was developed only in the Baroque era. In the written story of Christ’s Passion there is no episode of Jesus being thrown into a dungeon. Yet the Calvary of the town of St. Radegund, near Graz, Austria, presents what I would call a ‘queer Jesus in the dungeon’. What is quite peculiar to this statue of Jesus, dating probably from the end of the eighteenth century, are the restraints that this muscled figure wears on its neck, arms and ankles, and that make hardly any narrative or practical sense. They evoke, however, a S/M sexual scene, reinforced by the ‘casual’ view of Jesus’ naked buttocks. Moreover, his posture does not so much as convey physical pain or mental suffering as perform a sort of queering of Jesus’ male identity. I cannot help but superimposing the figure of young Udo Kier of Mark of the Devil onto such a queer Christ, building on the clue given to viewers by director Michael Armstrong, who chose to superimpose onto the scene of Christian’s execution the image of the crucifix. Despite the external identity of the character of Christian as a male heterosexual in love with Vanessa, his general demeanour and look in the film is much more ambiguous: clearly he does not exude masculinity, but rather an androgynous and highly sexualised mix of gender traits. In the end, then, among other things, Mark of the Devil might be seen as helping Christians to look at Jesus as a queer figure, without being by any means the first work of art attempting to draw such connection, as we can see in the eighteenth-century queer Jesus of St. Radegund.

Christ in the dungeon, Calvary in St. Radegund (Styria), Austria

​ConclusionMy theological reading of Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part II has attempted to present such works as Christian and feminist movies and has suggested that the usual Christian and feminist critiques of exploitation movies must be refined, even if not necessarily abandoned. It has also performed a tentative queering of Christian imagery, in the sense that it has staged an attempt at rescuing from ostracism and ridicule those Christian images that are the obvious antecedents of the torture scenes in Michael Armstrong and Adrian Hoven’s films. Modern liberal Christians do indeed miss something important in their own tradition if they refuse to be confronted with the depictions of sexualised pain that are widespread in so many historical churches. Such open study and reflection might help liberal theology to move beyond the mere ‘acceptance’ of sexuality. Christians may need to make space again for Jesus in the dungeon, perhaps today in a more conscious way than in the past. It is not a matter of condoning violence or its gratuitous representation, but it is a matter of acknowledging the complexity of human sexual feelings and identities, in the hope of letting go of the God of moralists, which is usually allied more with those who make crosses rather than with those who are still crucified on them.

Footnotes

John 1:11.

See Girard, R. ([1978] 1987) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

See Siegel, A. (2006) “Italian Society and the Origins of Eleventh-Century Western Heresy”, In: Frassetto, M. (ed.) Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore. Leiden: Brill, 43–72.

“Witch-hunting became history only gradually […]. But the leading thinkers of eighteenth-century Enlightenment certainly thought that it was, or ought to be, history – a shocking example of ‘superstition’ and ‘barbarity’ of recent centuries. The French philosopher Voltaire (1698–1778) was one of the most celebrated of these thinkers, bitterly and wittingly combating what he saw as the obscurantism of Christian theology.” Goodare, J. (2016) The European Witch-Hunt. Abingdon: Routledge, 364.

Heyward, C. (1989) Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God. San Francisco: Harper, 55.

For a recent and more developed perspective on the issue of S/M sex in a theological context, see Brown, L. D. (2010) “Dancing in the Eros of Domination and Submission within SM”, In: Isherwood, L. and Jordan, M. D. (eds) Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid. London: SCM, 141–152.